Love Your Blue Bubble, and Protect It

For all the excesses of the American left, it really is better.

Ron’s Burgers and Shakes, where I used to hang out with my friends. Note that Ron’s is the home of the “Big R burger.” Photo by me.

When I was a young person in the Spokane Valley, my best friend was a kid named Matt. His life was squalid and chaotic and mine was no picnic. We bonded over X-Men comics, Pink Floyd, material insecurity, and rage. We had plenty to be mad about, not least that we inhabited a culture that was deeply conservative, which is to say oppressive, hypocritical, parochial, dumb, and mean.

We’d watch movies together a lot. Woody Allen films were a favorite. They let us dream of being New Yorkers attending gallery openings and discussing the meaning of life instead of enduring Hank Williams Jr. songs about country boys surviving. If I sound judgmental I mean to.

Matt was severely bullied by dumb and mean Spokane Valley kids. Teachers mostly didn’t help. One day during art class a couple of girls kicked him, laughed, and said “kick the fat ass.” (Matt was overweight.) Even just typing that seems ridiculous, cartoonish, which of course it is. But it happened. And those of us who witnessed it didn’t intervene. Matt’s temper got the best of him and he took a swing at one of them, missing but still. Later, during lunch, the same girls found us sitting in the hallway, backs against our lockers. One of them poured her Dr. Pepper on Matt’s head. He just sat there and took it. Then he turned to me and said he was leaving. I went with him. We walked out of school and went to Matt’s house. I don’t remember any consequences for leaving school like that.

Once home, we found Matt’s sister, Andrea, also home for some reason. (It may have been a different day, honestly, but my memory has stitched these moments together.) Matt and Andrea got into some kind of silly argument and I watched Matt snap. He started yelling incoherently and crying and literally jumping up and down, like a cornered mouse. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since, but I understood it. It was a rage so deep and useless that all that was left to do was jump up and down and cry.

One time Matt came home to find his father drunk and passed out naked on the couch. Many times, Matt came to stay at my house for reasons I’ve forgotten but can’t have been good. At some point Matt’s mother—by then the only somewhat stable parent in his life—gave all their money away to a criminal Pentecostal gangster named Oral Roberts. Roberts had claimed God would kill him if he didn’t raise $8 million by a certain deadline. Matt’s mother, who I liked very much, was convinced it was a real emergency, so Oral Roberts got all their money. Matt may have come to stay with me again, but maybe not—our friendship was under strain and would soon end for good. I didn’t know it yet, but I was already orienting myself toward a different kind of future than the Spokane Valley afforded.

Anyhow, Matt ultimately dropped out of high school. I don’t know what became of him over the years, though I hear bits and pieces through the grapevine. Like, I heard his heart attack happened only a few months before mine.

I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this but I’m pretty sure it has to do with the presidential election. I’m pretty sure it has to do with the cold reality that a large number of Americans just gave all the family money to Oral Roberts, so to speak. As far as I know, one of them was Matt.

New Spokane friends I’ve met on social media, and old Spokane acquaintances, know that Spokane has changed a lot since I moved away in the 1980s. I want to say here that I don’t require it to have changed much in order to still love it. If you’ve never been to Eastern Washington, know that it’s beautiful and rich in cultural and natural history. I miss it for those reasons, as far as they go.

But Spokane remains the place where I learned about Trumpism long before Trumpism had a name. The Spokane Valley of my youth already featured many Trumpy pre-adaptations—willful ignorance, a me-first, might-makes-right ethic, and a toxic gullibility that made its citizens easy marks for the world’s Oral Robertses. One can overgeneralize about these things, but I’ll tell you this: I didn’t encounter much of that stuff after I ran off to Seattle.

Novelist and fellow Spokanite Jess Walter once wrote this:

“Right at the peak of my obnoxious and condescending loathing for my hometown, I rented a houseboat in Seattle for $900 a month so I could pretend I lived there. While staying on that boat, I had a conversation with someone about all that was wrong with Spokane. He said it was too poor and too white and too uneducated and too unsophisticated, and as he spoke, I realized something: this guy hated Spokane because of people like me. I grew up poor, white, and unsophisticated. I was the first in my family to graduate from college. And worse, I had made the same complaints. Did I hate Spokane because I hated people like me? Did I hate it for not letting me forget my own upbringing? Then I had this even more sobering thought: Was I the kind of snob who hates a place because it’s poor?”

I’ve thought about this quote a lot over the years. It’s left me feeling guilty and confused and off-balance. Like Walter, I grew up poor, white, and unsophisticated in Spokane, and I was the first in my family to graduate from college. Perhaps my loathing of Spokane has been obnoxious and condescending. Perhaps it still is, though I’d say “loathing” isn’t the right word anymore. These days I’d describe myself as exhausted by Spokane. And it’s not the poor, white, unsophisticated nature of it I fled from anyway. What I fled from was a culture of stupidity and cruelty. The Spokane of my youth was surprisingly dumb and mean. Not didn’t-go-to-college dumb, but Jewish-space-lasers dumb. Not Spokane-is-uncool mean, but kick-the-fat-ass mean. That’s what Spokane was to me. Certainly it’s what Trumpism is.

Of course (of course!) there were people in Spokane who were and remain wonderful, whose presence in my life still feels like a gift. Too many to name. Via social media, I’ve even met new friends who reside in Spokane. And teachers like Judy Dufford, Larry Bernbaum, and Barbara Buteaux were the Virgils to my Dante as I traveled through my childhood hell.

But it’s also true that the things I thought I had run away from—the things that, fairly or not, Spokane still symbolizes for me—are, as of about eight years ago, part of my daily life again, and yours, too. Space-lasers dumb. Kick-the-fat-ass mean. It sometimes feels like there’s no escape anymore, no more Seattle for me to run off to.

Years ago, Facebook tempted me to think the people I grew up with had matured and changed. Some have. But it shames me to think of how many people I know have voted for a man who openly bragged about committing sexual assault, who is a malignant narcissist, a racist, a misogynist, and an authoritarian. Corrupt, incompetent… dumb and mean. I emphasize that these aren’t nameless, faceless people abstracted into electoral votes. These are people I grew up with, people I have loved and laughed with.

I think what hurts the most is that it’s exactly what my 17-year-old self would have predicted at the beginning of my “obnoxious and condescending” loathing. I thought maybe things had changed. They didn’t. Not enough anyway.

One Trump voter I know was once among my best friends. He’s a Border Patrol agent now. I thought of him when I read this on someone’s social media feed: “It depresses the hell out of me that people I grew up with have turned into people that I wouldn't tell where Anne Frank was hiding.” 

One time, when this old friend and I were trying to catch up soon after the 2016 election, he said something about deporting “illegals.” In the old days, I’d have told him he was full of shit and then we would have gone to the movies or whatever. In 2016, when I quipped that I’d hide someone if necessary, there was a pause and then my old friend asked me if I had a plan to hide someone. His tone had changed. We weren’t just hassling each other any longer. And I panicked and backtracked and humiliated myself just trying to change the subject. I can imagine mutual friends now insisting “he’d never…” and things like that, to which I can only reply, “are you sure?”

Fleeing Spokane was hard because I left so many good people behind. I’m grateful for Facebook’s easy way of getting back in touch them. But I’ve also been brutally reminded of why I left, Jess Walter’s admonition notwithstanding. Trumpism aligns itself with persuasion by force, domination, indifference to reality, and contempt for anyone who is weaker. Those were the characteristics I fled when I adopted Seattle as my new home, not poverty or whiteness or lack of education. When I got to Seattle there were nice and thoughtful people all over the place and I loved it. Ever since then I have lived in deep blue cities; Tucson, Arizona, Madison, Wisconsin, Charlottesville, Virginia. I love them all and will never go back if I can help it.

There is a lot of self-flagellating on the left right now. We’re good at that. The pundit-class is bellyaching about how we all live in the dreaded “blue bubble.”

I understand. But I also want to push back. It isn’t because we’re in a blue misinformation bubble that we think Trump voters are willing to be dumb and mean. We are rightly shocked by what’s underneath the vote counts—a majority that is at best ok with others being harmed in service to their specific preferences. If we didn’t see it coming it’s perhaps because most of us couldn’t imagine such a thing, living as we do by an ethic of being nice to people.

Here’s my advice if you live in a blue bubble: Love it and take care of it. Your culture really is better. And enough with that stuff about how all cultures are equally valid. You’ve never really believed that anyhow and it’s past time to let it go. Some cultures are bad for their inhabitants and bad for the world, and we’d all be better off without them. But because it would be morally wrong to forcefully get rid of them, or, for some of you, even to say what I just said (whoops), the best we can hope for is to support and maintain our own.

Do that.

Addendum: Now I have some data: